Andre de Ruyter explains load-shedding, for the last time as CEO

Hours before leaving Eskom on Wednesday night, former CEO André de Ruyter used the sitting of the public enterprises portfolio committee in parliament to explain for the last time why the country was at stage 6 load-shedding, again.

“The situation remains very tight and susceptible to further changes but I can give the committee that the Eskom team is working with a view to preventing that,” said De Ruyter on Wednesday.

During the sitting, De Ruyter had a tough time with MPs, including minister Pravin Gordhan, grilling and slamming him for an interview he did with eNCA in which he revealed explosive information about the inner workings and criminality within the power utility.

De Ruyter, who was interviewed by eNCA's Anika Larsen, was asked if he thought Eskom was the “feeding trough” for the ANC, to which he replied: “I would say the evidence suggests that it is.”

He said: “I expressed my concern to a senior government minister about attempts, in my view, to water down governance around the $8.5bn that, by and large to Eskom’s intervention, we got at COP26, and the response was essentially that you must be pragmatic. To pursue the greater good, you have to enable some people to eat a little bit,” he said.

“So yes, I think it’s entrenched.”

Asked what happened when he reported his concerns and ongoing criminal activity at Eskom, he said: “So when we pointed out that there was one particular high-level politician that was involved in this, the minister in question looked at a senior officials and said, ‘I guess it was inevitable that it would come out anyways.’”

To De Ruyter, this suggested that corruption “was not news” to them.

Earlier Gordhan told MPs that corporate governance required that the Eskom board look at clips of the eNCA interview that had been posted on social media, deliberate on the matter and report back to the shareholder and parliament on the outcome of their deliberations.

During what has turned out to have been De Ruyter's last parliamentary appearance, the ANC’s Jabulile Mkhwanazi expressed her concern about De Ruyter’s conduct (in the interview).

“I am really not comfortable with the way that the issues were raised on that platform and the issues that were raised but I want to suggest that we deal with the matter next week because I think it is very important and sensitive matter,” she said.

Her colleague Nkosinathi Dlamini said he would reserve his comments because the presentation was not going to translate to the immediate availability of electricity.

“We have 11 hours in the darkness now and we have a CEO that just told the country that the ANC wants to steal that $5.8bn — but he has never confided in us as to who those companies are that supply dirty coal to Eskom.

“But he chose to play into a political space through his utterances about how the people that negotiate with the World Bank and investors use terms that were last seen in the 80s.

“It then shows that we are in a serious crisis if we have to read about these things in the media when the CEO knows full well that he can approach Scopa and other bodies in government that are there to fight corruption. But he chose to go to the media to further his own agenda, which is not known yet.”

DA  leader John Steenhuisen in a statement said the party was drawing up an urgent request to Eskom management in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act (Paia) demanding to know the name of the senior minister De Ruyter referred to.

“In the interests of accountability, transparency and combating the ANC corruption that has caused the load-shedding crisis, the DA’s Paia request will compel Eskom management to not only make public the name of the senior ANC politician concerned but to hand over all information and evidence at their disposal regarding the ANC’s involvement in corruption at Eskom,” he said.

De Ruyter, who tendered his resignation in December 2022 and was due to leave at the end of March, explained to MPs why the country was at stage six load-shedding.

“As you may recall from the previous presentation we have three units out at Kusile (units one, two and three) owing to the fact that we had the collapse of a flue at unit one.

“When this flue collapsed, it impinged on the two flues carrying emissions from units two and three and that rendered all three units inoperable. That has led to the loss of 2,160 megawatts.

“We intend to return these units to service by December of this year and we have already ordered the necessary steel as well as engaged with the contractor to commence the repair of this particular flue to ensure that we can return these units to service.

 “We are waiting (for) a delegation from the department of fisheries, forestry and environment to allow us to exceed during the time that we bypass the flue-gas desulfurisation unit certain sulphur emission standards and we are receiving good support from that department.”

He said one unit was out at Koeberg.

“That adds a further 928 megawatts to the shortfall in generation capacity. This is a planned outage to extend the lifespan of Koeberg by a further 20 years. This is unavoidable.”

At Kusile Unit 5, De Ruyter said, while this plant was still under construction, there was a gas air fire heater which caused an additional loss of 400 megawatts.

“A Medupi 4, again another 700 megawatts and then due to high ambient air temperatures in Lephalale, we have so-called vacuum load losses, which is due to poor performance from our dry cooling system that we use at this power station.”

There is an average load loss of between 600 to 1000 megawatts at the Matimba power station.

“The structural loses that we had, that are baked into the current situation, amount to about 5,000 megawatts. Now if you then add to that the events that took place during the weekend where, we had the new valkyrie which supplies the Lethabo power plant not being able to supply us with sufficient dry coal, bearing in mind the elevated water level in the Vaal river system, that then caused us to run out of coal at two units at Lethabo — and that precipitated stage 6 load-shedding.”

He said Eskom had been able to avoid, for the moment, any higher stages of load-shedding because it was able to manage its diesel reserves as well as pump hydro storage.

On Wednesday evening, Eskom announced that de Ruyter had left after a “special board meeting” on Wednesday night. De Ruyter had reached a “mutual agreement” about his early departure. 

“The board further resolved that Mr de Ruyter will not be required to serve the balance of his notice period but that he will be released from his position with immediate effect,” the board said.